Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic Awareness Explained: the difference between Phonemic Awareness and Phonics (video)
https://youtu.be/HZEiRoFoYUE (phonemic awareness exercise- Bingham)
Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes, the smallest mental units of sound that helps to differentiate units of meaning. Separating the spoken word "cat" into three distinct phonemes, and, requires phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness strategies help young children build a foundation for reading and spelling. When students are ready to read, activities involving phonemic skills can further develop these abilities and encourage a passion for reading.
The National Reading Panel identified common tasks used to assess or improve children’s phonemic awareness. These methods include:
- Isolation: This means recognizing individual sounds in words. For example, the first sound in “paste” (/p/).
- Identity: This is recognizing the common sound in different words. For example, the sound that is the same in “bike,” “boy” and “bell” (/b/).
- Categorization: This is when the child is asked to find the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words. For example, “rug” is the word that does not belong in “bus, bun, and rug.”
- Blending: By listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds, the child learns to combine them to form a recognizable word. For example, the word created with the sounds “/s/ /k/ /u/ /l/” is “school.”
- Segmentation: Students may tap out or count the sounds of a word, or pronounce and position a marker for each sound. For example, counting the number of phonemes in “ship” (three: /š/ /I/ /p/).
- Deletion: When a phoneme is removed, the child learns to recognize the word that remains. For example, the word created when /s/ from “smile” is eliminated (“mile”).
Phonological awareness activities and lessons should involve:
- Highlighting phonological awareness concepts in songs, rhymes, poems, stories, and written texts
- Finding patterns of rhyme, initial/final sound, onset/rime, consonants, and vowels, by:
- Matching pictures to other pictures
- Matching pictures to sound-letter patterns (graphemes)
- Matching pictures to words
- Matching words to other words
- Using games to practice the awareness of syllables, rhyme, initial/final sound, and individual sounds in words.
Click the link below for a 10 lesson Phonemic Awareness Packet: